Considerations for HLA Federations of Communications Simulations

The high-level architecture (HLA) standard allows for an automated interconnect of heterogeneous simulations. This federation of disparate simulations allows efficient and economical reuse of software to provide an environment in which to test and evaluate the operational performance of new protocols by measuring characteristics such as bandwidth consumption and message latency for the communication network. There are many design considerations required in the development of new simulations for the federation as well as the adaptation of legacy simulation systems to function in the HLA environment. Furthermore, the simulation architecture must encompass the inclusion of hardware-in-the-loop. This paper will detail some of these considerations